bubble: "We like to fight, all in, not that much utility and just go all in!"

We talked to Kamen "⁠bubble⁠" Kostadinov, whose Windigo made it through Group E with the top seed after a victory over Movistar Riders and splitting maps with fnatic.

Windigo, the squad representing Bulgaria at the WESG 2018 World Finals, will face underdogs Furious, although were they to win, everything points towards MIBR waiting for them in the quarter-finals. bubble & co. made their way to the playoffs after beating the Spanish side, Movistar Riders, and tying with fnatic.

In the interview, bubble walks us through preparation, the team's evolution with Valentin "⁠poizon⁠" Vasilev in the squad, the feelings before flying to China and after playing their first match day, and the team and organization settling things and no longer having the roster transfer listed.

First of all, let's talk about before you came here. You were playing the Pinnacle Cup, did you have any time to prepare?

We played a lot of online cups and we bootcamped for a week. We had good and bad times, but we're playing pretty well here. Everyone is on point, so...

You say you had some good and bad times, were you not very confident coming in?

We weren't coming with a lot of confidence but we had two days' practice here and we saw that everyone was on point with communication, shooting, and yeah... it's totally different from the bootcamp.

You had a rough group with Riders and fnatic, you beat the former 2-0 and tied with fnatic... Was that expected?

We knew the maps we were going to play. Honestly, I expected to win Overpass against fnatic and I knew that Inferno was going to be a very tough match. Against Movistar I expected to play Overpass as well, but they decided to ban it, so we picked their weakest map, Mirage. We knew they were going to pick Train, and honestly, I was expecting we would win 2-0, but winning Overpass instead of Mirage.

You were also supposed to face ENCE before they decided to pull out, how did you feel about that, would you have liked to play them?

Sure, yeah! They were the Major finalists, so it would have been a good experience for us, but yeah...

What goals did you have for the tournament? And now?

The first goal was to get through the group stage and show everything we got and go forward as much as we can. The team we're more scared of is MIBR because they're playing Nuke now and they have a really good map pool. We practiced Overpass against them and they had some pretty insane results against us, so it's going to be a scary game if we play against them.

The team has been together for about five months now, how is after bringing on poizon, one of the big up and coming talents?

He was adapting pretty fast. I gave him all of the roles I was doing before and I took Nikolay "⁠pNshr⁠" Paunin's roles. He's playing a bit aggressive and he has more space than I had before as an AWPer. He's showing insane confidence, and he's giving us confidence because when he's fighting we can't leave him, so it's just fighting everywhere. He brings a lot of firepower to the team and we're happy that we have him.

Do you like that aggressive style?

Yeah, for sure, for sure. We like to fight, all in, not that much utility and just go all in! [laughs]

Do you think the team plays better on LAN than online?

Actually, I think we're a bit better online because we lack some LAN experience as a team, but today we showed a different team on LAN and I expect us to be like this in the future, to grow as a team and get more experience at tournaments like this. It's going to be helpful.

One thing that I can't recall being resolved was the whole issue of the team being for sale. How did that all end up?

No, no, three of the players already re-signed new contracts, we're sticking together and looking forward.

So it was just a rough moment?

Yeah, but everything is fine now.

So Yanko "⁠blocker⁠" Panov is sitting in the middle, is he calling now?

No, no, I'm still calling, he's sitting in the middle because we changed around who's sitting where for everyone to be confident.

Is it to like look at each other's monitors to see what's happening and so on?

Yeah, exactly. And you know, me and Viktor "⁠v1c7oR⁠" Dyankov have been playing for a long, long time together, like four or five years already, so we stick together, close to each other, and the young players stick close to each other on the other side.